National Black Women's Equal Pay Day
While Equal Pay Day marks the date that women must work into the next year to be paid the same amount as men were paid the previous year, National Black Women's Equal Pay Day marks the day when Black women finally catch up themselves. In 2021, Black women earned an average of around 63 to 68 cents for every $1 that white men earned. The racial and gender biases that Black women must face become crystal clear when we break it down in such fiscal terms.

This year, National Black Women's Equal Pay Day falls on Sept. 21. It’s a day that reminds us Black women deserve pay equity. And yet these sisters suffer from gender-based wage discrimination and occupational segregation.

From a study by the National Women’s Law Center in March 2021, Black women in the U.S. earned $41,098, while white, non-Hispanic men earned $65,208 – averaging to 63 cents for every $1 that such men made. In Alabama, that pay gap widens further: Black women earned $31,244 compared to the $53,797 that white men made, equating to only 58 cents for every $1.

Black women in America have always been expected to work, but that labor hasn’t always been paid, or paid well. The work done by Black women has historically been tied to their lower socioeconomic status in comparison to white women – including having to sacrifice their own family life to care for white women’s families. Even today, Black women still disproportionately work in caregiving jobs. These jobs are notoriously underpaid.

Black women still often are the ones to care for others’ families as their jobs. Because child care, even as a career, involves nurturing children, it has been perceived as merely “women’s work” for generations. This then means that it has rarely been viewed as “real work” within our society and remains constantly undervalued, especially when that work is being done by Black women.

That then leads to the constant refrain that child care is more of a private responsibility than a public necessity – it’s as if our own world is telling us that, if a Black woman can do it, then it’s not important. This creates an ever-compounding issue. First, the child care industry continues to be woefully underfunded. Because of that, the people who work in child care – including and especially Black women – remain underpaid themselves. These child care workers are often earning an income that’s under their state’s poverty line, perpetuating a cycle of poverty not only within our minority populations but also our own child care workforce.

This is why the Alabama Institute for Social Justice launched The Alabama Movement for Child Care (TAMCC) – to build public support and increase state funding to create a more equitable and affordable child care system. TAMCC aims to build a network of providers, workers, parents, and advocates that would work strategically to build public support and increase state funding, which would then help reframe equitable and affordable child care as critical infrastructure to help Alabama’s economy and communities become stronger.

Each of us has a responsibly to level the playing field for those that are marginalized, and highlighting National Black Women's Equal Pay Day offers an important opportunity to bring awareness to a lingering issue that continues to diminish the critical role that Black women play, as well the priceless value they bring, in advancing our global society.
About The Alabama Institute for Social Justice: The Alabama Institute for Social Justice (AISJ) works strategically to remove barriers that particularly limit and/or undermine the economic well-being of women and people of color. To learn more about the organization, and our gender equity platform, please visit http://alisj.org/.